At this moment, you must be immersed in the atmosphere of the Spring Festival.
If I asked you whether the Spring Festival was a holiday or a festival, how would you answer?
Is there a difference between a holiday and a festival? You may find this a strange question.
The difference is huge. Holidays are personal, and festivals are public.
You are free to arrange your vacation as you like, and you can go wherever you want, with nothing to do with society and nothing to do with others.
Festivals are different. Festivals have a set of public rituals, which always belong to a specific group, from a large country to a village or a family.
I remember half a century ago, when I was a child, there was always a military parade and fireworks on National Day. Every October 1st, after dinner, quickly climb to the roof and wait for the colorful sky over the distant People's Square. On the black roof, there are such excited little kids like me.
When the Spring Festival comes, the whole family begins to get busy, making spring rolls, making egg dumplings, holding the hands of adults, and going to the vegetable market to buy New Year's goods. The New Year has the flavor of the New Year, and the Spring Festival has a joyful atmosphere.
I just live in the magic capital, if I am in the countryside, the Spring Festival to welcome the lord (god), the lion dance, the Dragon Boat Festival to row a dragon boat, the Qingming Festival, the Zhongyuan to worship the ancestors, the Mid-Autumn Festival to admire the moon, Chongyang to ascend. Every festival has its own unique rituals and rich connotations.
This is the festival, a public festival that is not the same as the holiday.
Every festival has a cultural ritual that has been passed down from hundreds of thousands of years of customs, and don't ask why, it should be. Without rituals, there are no festivals.
The ritual of the festival is a cultural game. Let everyone who participates in the game realize that this moment is no longer a lonely "me", but a "we" with a common bloodline, culture and a sense of destiny.
If there were no festivals, no rituals, there would be no "we".
Once upon a time, these collective rituals and beautiful festivals slowly disappeared, whether it was the Spring Festival, National Day, or the Dragon Boat Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival, they all transformed from public festivals to personal holidays.
In the past Spring Festival, relatives from all over the world gathered together, and today's festival allows people in a city to go their separate ways.
It was a great transformation from a society of acquaintances to a society of strangers, and perhaps it was an irreversible trend of the times, right?
But I still miss the Spring Festival when I was a child, and I miss the fireworks, firecrackers, dumplings, spring rolls, and the greeting and lion dances that I have never experienced.
Is loneliness the fate of modern man? Is the atomized individual an inevitable trend?
No, no, culture is self-chosen, and a sense of ritual can be created.
The younger generation in modern society pursues personal freedom, the more they desire to belong to the community, and the more they want to have their own cultural identity.
It's just that this kind of collective belonging and cultural identity is no longer compulsory. prescribed, but pluralistic and optional.
Let's have a little more ritual sense of the Spring Festival, just like those Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day of foreigners.
This is another Spring Festival in the Year of the Dragon, and I am looking forward to it.
I love the holidays, and I love the New Year even more.
I don't want the holidays to become holidays, and I don't want the holidays to become holidays.
Let the holiday be a holiday, and the New Year is still the New Year.